Jocelyn Cuevas, 7, watches the adults talk in their backyard in San Jose.

Jocelyn Cuevas, 7, watches the adults talk in their backyard in San Jose.

Photo: Mason Trinca / Special To The Chronicle

Thousands of ‘Dreamers’ face agonizing choices about their children

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Erika Almanza picked up her 11-year-old son from school in San Jose one afternoon shortly after President Trump was elected and began to ask him about his day, but first the boy needed his own questions answered.

She assured him she would not, because she is a “Dreamer” — one of the more than 200,000 people in California protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.

Now Almanza doesn’t know what to tell her son and his 7-year-old sister after the Trump administration announced Tuesday it is phasing out DACA. She is facing not only the prospect of being deported to Mexico in a couple of years, but the realization that she would probably choose to leave behind her children, who are U.S. citizens by birth.

More on DACA

“Their life is here. They only know here. The same way my life is here,” said Almanza, a 27-year-old small-business owner, who was brought to the U.S. from Mexico at age 4. Her partner, the children’s father, is undocumented.

While attention on the DACA program has long focused on college students, surveys suggest that up to a quarter of the nearly 700,000 recipients are believed to be parents of citizens. These relationships add a powerful dimension to the debate as Trump, who professed “love” for “Dreamers” even as he rescinded DACA, asks Congress to come up with a solution.

The young parents are worried not only about their own fate, but also their children’s futures, if the end of DACA leads to deportations. They are weighing a variety of fraught factors, including the quality of education available in their native countries, their kids’ ages, and the availability of an American relative or other guardian who would step in.

Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who has been critical of the Trump administration’s tightening of immigration, said “Dreamers” who lose protection would not, by virtue of having a child who is a citizen, have a clear path to gaining a visa.

“The fact that our draconian immigration laws wouldn’t allow a former DACA-recipient parent with U.S.-citizen children a reasonable path to regular status in this country showcases just how harsh and ridiculous our system is,” he said. “No one benefits.”

Unless Congress takes action, the phaseout of DACA will take a few years, because recipients will remain protected through their current term. But new applications are no longer accepted, and those whose protection is set to expire in the next six months must renew their two-year status by Oct. 5. Starting March 6, tens of thousands of recipients will begin to see their status expire, and could be deported.

Almanza, who is seeking to renew her DACA protection through January 2020, is one of many people already looking ahead to worst-case scenarios.

Photo: Mason Trinca / Special To The Chronicle

Erika Almanza asks her son, Angel Almanza, 11, to get ready for bed at their apartment in San Jose.

Erika Almanza asks her son, Angel Almanza, 11, to get ready for bed...

Family members, including her mother, oppose her tentative plan to leave behind her son and daughter if she is ordered to leave the country, telling her that a mother should always remain with her kids. She said she knows they are right — and feels it — but has to think about a bigger picture.

“There is no future over there with my kids. I want to do it for my kids’ future,” she said. “I cry because it’s overwhelming what could happen next. I’m really scared. I’ve never been more scared.”

Launched in 2012 by former President Barack Obama, DACA offered renewable, two-year work permits to applicants who were younger than 31 on June 15, 2012, had come to the U.S. before they were 16 and had lived here since June 2007. The program prompted many to establish stronger roots in America — going to school, developing a career or starting a family.

More than half of recipients surveyed this year by UC San Diego Professor Tom Wong said they got a job with better pay, got their first credit card and bought their first car after acceptance into the program. According to the same study, which was done for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, 25.7 percent of recipients said they had a child with U.S. citizenship, while 59 percent said they had an American sibling.

More than 70 percent said DACA had allowed them to earn more money and help their family financially. Wages went up from an average of about $20,000 to more than $36,000, the survey found.

“DACA has impacted family stability and building of communities. It’s allowed parents to work legally in the U.S. and earn an income in order to provide for their families, which include their own parents, their children and extended family members like their siblings,” said Marissa Montes, co-director of the Loyola Law School’s Immigrant Justice Clinic in Los Angeles.

She cited the case of one of her clients, a mother of five who got married at a young age to an abusive husband. Because of DACA, she was able to leave the relationship, obtain a stable job and support her children.

On Tuesday, the client called Montes in a panic, saying, “What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to my children, because my children depend solely on me?”

Other clients, she said, have voiced similar fears in recent days. “I’m getting a sense of desperation,” Montes said.

At a news conference in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the administration had no choice but to shut down the program because it was “an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch.” Several states had threatened to sue if Trump had not eliminated the program. Sessions also said DACA was a form of “amnesty” and, without offering evidence, said it had denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans.

On Thursday, at the urging of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, Trump sought to reassure “Dreamers.” Referring to the fact that no one can be deported until March, he said on Twitter, “For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about — No action!”

Those assurances, and the possibility that Congress will step in, are little comfort to Jennifer Sotz, a 23-year-old legal counselor in the Bay Area, who gave birth to a baby girl just a few weeks ago. Her DACA protection expires in February, though she has applied for a renewal.

The program has allowed her to hold a stable job and save for motherhood. She was, for the first time, able to get health insurance through her work.

All of a sudden, though, Sotz is confronted with the possibility that she will be deported to Honduras, a poverty-stricken country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, according to the U.S. State Department. She left when she was 10.

Hours after Sessions announced the rollback of the program, Sotz, whose husband is undocumented, called her mother to relay her fears — that the government possessed all of her information through her DACA application, and that she would be deported with her daughter to a country she hardly knew. She has no future in Honduras, she said.

“Let’s wait, pray and hope that they can do something about it,” her mother told her.

“I’m hopeful,” Sotz said she responded, “but it’s hard not knowing. It’s like our future is up in the air.”